Growing Grapes At Home: Pruning Your Vines

As a home grower, there are tasks to be done regularly in the care of your growing grapes at home. These tasks can be daunting and tiresome, but once you get the hang of them, you’ll find them quite routine and easy to do. Pruning is one task that needs to be done regularly. It is a very important job that needs to be done every year.

You might ask, why do you need to prune your grape vines? Basically, without pruning, your grape vines will go out of control and produce more and more flower clusters, but won’t produce quality grapes, and sometimes won’t even produce fruits at all. Pruning deflects the growth of the vine to the fruit.

Grapes grow from the buds of grape vines planted in the previous year. This is why developing the young vine is essential to having a successful grape vine. To prepare the young vine, you need to prune and train it. You need to remove the fruiting canes and spurs that developed so that healthy new canes will be produced every year.

Also, if you don’t prune your growing grapes at home, your vines will become a tangled mess. When grape vines are allowed to grow without control, the foliage will soon cover the vines and this will lessen their exposure to sunlight and air. This is a bad environment for your plant and will result in diseases and insects, and without sunlight, your grapes will not ripen. So you need to keep your vines pruned for optimal sunlight and airflow to reach the vines and growing fruit.

Perhaps the next thing you’re wondering about is when to prune your grape vines. Generally, you need to prune your vines after the roughest part of the winter is over and before the new season starts the growth of the vine. This is usually late February to early March in many areas, but if you’re in a warm location like California, you can do this earlier. But be careful not to prune too early if your location is known for heavy spring frost. If you prune too early, you will increase the chance of frost damage on your grape vines.

As a home grape grower, always be careful when pruning your grape vine so as not to injure the plant. For year-old shoots, you can use a hand pruner effectively. For larger woods on your grape vine, a lopper or a handsaw should be used.

Each year when you prune, you should have a plan to follow. Do not just randomly cut off shoots and canes on your grape vine—this is really a big mistake that new grape growers make. You need to develop a pruning structure, and begin the first year of growing grapes at your home.

Pruning your growing grapes at home regularly is really essential for your plants to bear and produce quality grapes. The job can be tiresome, but you’ll rest well knowing you will have a healthy grape vine with plentiful fruits.

By: Noah Stanton

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Want to know more about growing grapes at home and how you can have a thriving grape vineyard, visit www.AllAboutGrapeGrowing.com.